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Comment by ijustlovemath | Hacker News Reader

non-invasive continuous blood sugar measurement is mired in patents and technical challenges. Turns out it's really difficult to disambiguate the absorption lines of glucose from other similarly shaped molecules when you're also dealing with untangling skin conductivity, transmissivity, sweat, inflammation etc.

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I also think there's no financial incentive from incumbents to develop something like this. Why would abbott develop something that works "forever" if they can milk people buying new sensors every 10~14 days.

For abbott, no. But what about for Garmin, Apple, Samsung, or Google?

Diabetics would snap up a smart watch which does accurate glucose monitoring in a heartbeat.

There is a major IP holder in the space who is asserting their ownership, so even if they could solve the technical challenges, they might not be able to come to market.

> There is a major IP holder in the space who is asserting their ownership,

Is it a secret? Why not name them?

As a T1 diabetic, can confirm.

Yes, yes, that's what I meant. The current glucose monitoring manufacturers don't have the incentive, we'll have to wait for someone to disrupt the market with something more permanent

Gotcha. Yeah, I misread your comment then. I thought you were suggesting that innovation here is stalled because the likes of abbott aren't incentivized to build it. My point was mostly that I don't think that's the case since there are other pretty large companies who would benefit from bringing a non-invasive monitor to market.

IDK that it's really possible to get accurate glucose measurements without at least a little bit of invasiveness. I don't even think the lifespan of the current CGMs are being artificially shortened. I do think they are overpriced. But my understanding of how they work (silver coating on the spike generates a voltage) it makes sense that they have a limited lifespan.

The telling part, to me, that they are overpriced is that finger stick glucose monitors come out to roughly the same cost per month because of test strips are really expensive. The fact the both manufacturers have identical pricing is also pretty suspicious.

The latest CGMs are definitely not cheap on the R&D side. The obvious implementation is really susceptible to interference from common drugs, which is a really expensive thing to fix. They're also trying to get wider adoption in the hospital which requires fixing similar issues with many different compounds. FDA is still quite tough on biocompatibility. They definitely are taking a good profit though.

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